Thanks to our amazing partnership with Young Traditions Vermont, the IAA will be hosting a contra dance residency!

Local dance caller and leader Mary Wesley will join Mr. Myregaard’s music classes, grades 2 – 5, for a two-week dance residency! Mary will share some of her favorite traditional American and English social dances including partner dances in circles, longways and square formations as well as some singing and play-party games. We will also learn some of the history behind these dance and music traditions and talk about the different reasons people dance together. The residency runs from February 9th through February 20th.

For more info about Mary Wesley click here, for info about Young Traditions Vermont click here.

IAA Puppet Residency

Puppeteers Barbara Paulsen and Dan Baginski kicked off a five day puppet residency with a performance of Bully! For the Big Pigs! at Friday Town Meeting on January 9th. This was followed by five days of puppet building in kindergarten through grade 3. The No Strings Marionette Company worked closely with classroom teachers to integrate classroom content with puppet designs. Rod puppets depicting Martin Luther King and Rosa Parks were made by Ms. Lynda's STEP students. Elephant and piggy puppets were made by first graders for their new Elephant and Piggy book unit. Other classes created puppets of the solar system, self portraits, and even Greek Gods. To say that the students had a fun time throughout this residency was an understatement. Engagement, motivation and delight were so evident in every workshop. The residency culminated on January 16th when the students got to show off their puppet creations and their newly learned puppeteer tricks at the Friday Town Meeting Puppet Party! This residency was brought to IAA due to a generous Artists in Schools grant from our friends at the Vermont Art Council and a matching grant from our partner, Burlington City Arts.

Beginning on January 8th and running for 6 weeks, IAA students will be participating in an afterschool Ukulele class. The class is presented by Integrated Arts Academy and Young Tradition Vermont with support from the Vermont Community Foundation, the Turrell Fund, the Nelson Family Foundation and others

This is an after school activity for IAA students only. Not open to the public.

The class will be taught by musician, performing artist, educator, and YTV board member Brian Perkins. Brian has recorded and performed with countless brass and traditional string bands. He has been involved with the many groups that foster traditional music and dance in Vermont. Along with his daughter Ella, he has become involved in the Burlington Public School District music programs including the musical theater productions of Burlington’s Very Merry Theater. In recent years Brian has been on teaching staff at Trad Camp and has also taught classes through Burlington Parks and Recreation, FlynnArts and Edmunds Middle School, where he directs the 6th Grade Jazz Band. He is delighted to lead the first group of after school ukulele players at IAA.

Participants will learn basic skills in operating and caring for a Ukulele as well as skills for collective and individual music making. They will play common folk songs used for social music making. This music will be from the American folk tradition with a special focus on the immigrant traditions which have enriched and continue to add to our common music.

Classes are on Thursdays from 3 to 4 in the music room at IAA. They begin on Thursday, January 8, 15, 22, 29, February 5 & 12th

Come check out our Winter clothing Give Away if your child is in need of a coat, boots, snowpants, a fleece sweatshirt, or a hat. There is a surplus of winter gear in the front hallway of IAA. We have received some generous donations from community members who wanted to pass on gently used items to share. Thanks to those who were able to donate any items!

Circus Smirkus at IAA!

IAA has the good fortune of working with Circus Smirkus for a five day residency. All IAA students, pre-k through grade 5 get hands on circus training with Joni White Hansen, a lead teacher at Circus Smirkus. The residency runs through PE class and will culminate with a mini "show and tell" at Friday's Town Meeting, November 7th at 2:15 pm. Come One, Come All! Check out our young circus performers!

Our Literacy Breakfasts were a wonderful success!

Thank you to all who were able to come and take part in our Literacy Celebrations! We had a great turn out of families who came to enjoy their child reading, and who joined us for breakfast with their child's class. It is an amazing way for families and teachers to connect in order to be a successful team, and for families to know what is going on in their child's class.

ONE STRINGS Begins on September 29th!

We are proud to announce the launch of our third year of ONE STRINGSat IAA for 4th and 5th graders. We begin on Monday, September 29 and run for 24 weeks ending in May of 2015. ONE STRINGS (or Old North End Strings) is inspired byEl Sistema, a Venezuela-born program that has successfully brought orchestral music and instruction to underprivileged schoolchildren in several countries for more than 30 years, with more than 50 programs in the U.S.. ONE Strings is intended to develop a sense of community and collective achievement among the children, using principles borrowed from El Sistema such as every child can learn to experience music, and the benefits from that learning inform critical life choices those students make.

Our program includes two 30-minute sessions per week. On Monday, Tuesday, and Thursday mornings, all 97 fourth and fifth graders and their teachers and paraeducators learn to play violins in a group lesson under the instruction of violinist, Kathleen Kono. Unlike the Suzuki method or other similar approaches that focus on individual or small-group instruction, an entire class of 20+ students play as an ensemble with their classroom teacher.

The IAA partners with the Vermont Youth Orchestra Association and the Lake Champlain Chamber Music Festival (with their artistic director Soovin Kim,) to bring this program to our students. A Vermont Community Foundation grant helps fund the instruction, along with contributions from individual and corporate donors, as well as the school’s PTO.

The program offers many more engagement opportunities for students. Special to ONE Strings, the strings instructor and IAA teachers team up to create curriculum connections within the classroom and the music room. Additionally, LCCMF and VYOA provides tickets and access to community strings performances and dress rehearsals for students and their families as well as bringing string performances to IAA.

SUCCESSFUL OPEN HOUSES at IAA

Thank you to all who attended our Open House Nights last week! We had a wonderful turn out and teachers really felt like they were able to personally connect with families. I have heard that parents enjoyed themselves as well and were excited to get a first-hand glimpse of what goes on in their children's classrooms.

A huge thank you to Papa Frank's for cooking us tasty food and also to the PTO for providing it for us!

Connections like this are what makes The Integrated Arts Academy the special community that it is.

Thanks!

Sculptor Thea Alvin and IAA at St. Mike's

Sometimes an opportunity comes our way that we just can’t resist. This seems to happen a lot at IAA lately as we become more and more known for learning through the arts.

Last week our fourth and fifth graders were able to join an art installation in progress at St. Michael’s College. We paired up with St. Mike’s Education students, and assisted artist Thea Alvin as she created an enormous stone archway on the campus grounds. Thea Alvin is a stone mason who has been working with rocks for over 30 years. Her work reminds one of the much loved work of the famous artist, Andy Goldsworthy. Our students learned a bit about the physics involved in this kind of sculpture and then worked in teams to create their own small stone arch. See the snapshot page for visual details. Students also took advantage of the word garden and wrote some fun and lively stone art sentences. The arch is now a permanent outdoor installation at St. Mike’s and well worth a visit.

Lake Champlain Chamber Music Festival at IAA

The Lake Champlain Chamber Music Festival graced IAA today with a visit and performance by the Young Quartet Residency Fellows. It was a passionate performance for the fourth graders and a wonderful motivator for the soon to begin 3rd year of our ONE Strings Program at IAA.

ONE Strings at IAA uses an El Sistema inspired model of instruction for all of our 4th and 5th graders. The ONE Strings Program will run for 24 weeks this year and begins the first week of October. Here's a link to learn more about El Sistema: https://elsistemausa.org/

CCTA Information for the 2014-2015 School Year

For the 2014-2015 school year, the Burlington School District will continue our K-8 weekly release Wednesday schedule beginning August 27, the first student day. Elementary students will be dismissed on Wednesday at 1:50 pm with middle school dismissal at 2:00. Mountain Transit Inc. (a subsidiary of Student Transportation of America – STA) will provide the transportation from schools following six of the existing Neighborhood Special bus routes on the Wednesday early dismissal schedule.

Dismissal time the remaining four days of the week will be 2:50 pm for elementary and 3:00 pm for middle school. CCTA Neighborhood Specials will do morning runs, Monday to Friday and afternoon runs except on Wednesdays.

Until a soon to be determined date this Fall, as we did last year, student identification cards will not be required for NEIGHBORHOOD SPECIALS. For now, students may ride to and from school on CCTA regular routes from 7 am to 7 pm at no charge with student identification cards. CCTA will allow four weeks for students to secure their picture identification. No CCTA logo is required.

IAA, in partnership with multiple arts and higher education organizations, serves as a lab school for teaching artists from across the State. First semester the artists the teaching artists engage in a graduate level course using IAA for observations and participation to improve their practice in a public school setting.
They learn more about teaching through the arts, arts integration, and Universal Design for Learning, (UDL). Second semester some of them offer and teach arts residencies to our students. Read more about it in this Seven Days piece.

IAA El Sistema Pilot Strings Program in Year Two

ONE Strings Program Now in Year Two at IAA
Now in it's 2nd year, the Old North End Strings (ONE Strings) program at IAA is an El Ssitema inspired strings program that is engaging all 4th and 5th graders for 20 weeks this winter and spring. Students are engaged in ensemble playing with their homeroom teachers and all of their classmates twice a week during the school day.